DOMAIN NAME VALUE

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

CHOOSING COMBINED SCIENCE IGCSE

What is the Combined Science IGCSE? If you are from the United States it may not be relevant. This is a topic for people who have been following a UK Type Education System. First of all I need to ask my readers if they have an inquisitive mind. You don't need to be terribly inquisitive but are there questions in your mind about how things work? There are going to be students who will be faced with a problem of choosing whether or not to pursue science at around the age of 16 but I think that if you have any sort of questions about science but you don't necessarily want to become a scientist then this is a great course for you. Forget about the technical meaning of IGCSE because the terms keep changing all the time. If you are losing me then watch "She Blinded Me with Science" by Thomas Dolby first so that you can get into the mood!

I know that the screen capture for the blinding science video is not very impressive and the film is a bit old but it should be able to do the job!

FORGET ABOUT THE TECHNICAL NAME OF THE EXAM

Formerly there were GCE's and CSE's and then came the GCSE and IGCSE. I think that the terms are really not that important because anyone who loves science should be able to do well in any kind of teenage exam, no matter what it is called. I would like to inspire people to at least consider studying Combined Science at this age. Watch this old video called "She blinded me with Science" to get into the right frequency or wavelength because later on you will start to appreciate that -

There is a reason why I believe someone should chose science and it has to do with experiments. We are living in a society that believes everything we are being told but if you ever get a chance to learn about doing an experiment then you will know that sometimes we should not take someone's word for it. The great thing about science is that you have something called methods, results and conclusions. Your powers of reasoning might increase especially when you have to work with a problem solving experiment. It is not just about learning something from a book but actually "doing" experiments yourself and being puzzled by the fact that you don't understand why something is happening. This will cause you to conduct even more experiments. Later on in life you can use skills that you develop from the experiences you had while learning Combined Science.

I have to admit that I am no Scientist but I did pass my O level Combined Science Exams many years ago. I only just about passed and that is because I could not concentrate that well back then for personal reasons. It does not really matter now. What matters is that I managed to leave school with at least some kind of scientific background. Maybe you won't use it immediately but it will always be there and you can develop your knowledge even further in some particular part of science that interests you later on.

The great thing about the Combined Science is that you will cover some important basics in Biology, Chemistry and Physics. The Combined Science Examination is a combination of these three.

Science is not something that is either good or bad. It is neutral. People can use science to do good or to do bad. It all depends on who and why someone is using it.